Tag: murder

Rockaway resident arraigned on charges of murder and criminal possession of a weapon in connection with a homicide inside of 333 Beach 32 Street early on Sunday morning. This photo was shot by onrockaway.com in January of 2016, when a woman was shot and killed in the same building.

The Rockaway man who murdered his common-law wife and injured her mother in a vicious knife attack in Edgemere on Sunday morning was arraigned on Monday in Queens Criminal Court on charges ranging from second degree murder to criminal possession of a weapon.

On Monday afternoon, Queens District Attorney Richard A. Brown announced that 51-year-old Jonnie Jones, 42, of Beach 32 Street was arraigned on charges of second-degree murder, two counts of second-degree assault and two counts of fourth degree criminal possession of a weapon.

The defendant was held without bail and ordered to return to court on March 16.

District Attorney Brown said that, according to the charges, in the early morning hours of February 26, the defendant stabbed the victim, Monet Franklin, 51, with a knife, multiple times about the body which resulted in wounds to her left lung, heart, liver and right kidney thereby causing her death.

The defendant also allegedly stabbed the victim’s mother, Maria Franklin, 74, in the left hand causing severe lacerations. Police say that the elder Franklin was injured while attempting to protect her daughter from Jones’ deadly assault.

Jones was found by responding police outside the building, nearby the Beach 35 Street A-Train Station with bleeding cuts to his hand and an injured eye, police sources say.

May 26, 2016 / rockaway / Comments Off on Man punched in face during Far Rockaway robbery, falls and dies

The murder-robbery took place early on Thursday morning near the intersection of Mott Ave. and Beach Channel Drive.

A 57-year-old man was killed on a busy Far Rockaway street early Thursday after he was punched in the face during a strong arm robbery and hit his head on the sidewalk, police said.

The robbery took place on Mott Ave. near Beach Channel Dr. at about 4:30 a.m., police said.

Police said that the unidentified victim was walking along the sidewalk near a bus stop when he was attacked. He suffered serious head injuries and was taken to St. John’s Episcopal Hospital, where he was declared dead on arrival, police said.

Cops took 34-year-old DeAnthony Horten into custody near Mott Ave. and Central Ave, about two blocks from the attack scene, after the attack. He had lacerations and was also taken to St. John’s Episcopal Hospital. He was later charged with the murder.

Police said that they were looking for a black woman in connection with the attack. When last seen, police said, she was wearing a blue blazer and gray shorts.

Murder suspect Tyquan Long was brought back from California, where he fled after allegedly murdering his girlfriend.

A fugitive murder suspect who traveled more than 2,800 miles to escape from detectives from the 101 Precinct was ordered held without bail Friday. Tyquan Long, 29, is accused of fatally shooting his girlfriend Joann Gravette, 36, during a fit of jealousy inside a Beach 32 St. high-rise in Edgemere on Jan. 27.

Published sources said that Long and Gravette had been in a five-year relationship that soured after he started doing drugs.

As he fled the crime scene, he shot 51-year-old Barbara Romano, the mother of the man Long thought Gravette was cheating on him with, officials said.

After witnesses identified him as the shooter, Long fled to Sacramento, Calif., where he moved in with a former girlfriend, the mother of his child, officials said. He was there when detectives from the Regional Fugitive Task Force showed up and put him in handcuffs,

He was extradited to New York on Thursday, officials said.

Long, 29, allegedly shot girlfriend Joann Gravette, 36, in the stomach and left her dying on the floor of Apartment 11A inside 330 Beach 32 Street, often called Russian Towers by locals, at around 11 a.m., according to police sources.

The gunman’s jealous rage allegedly continued as he stalked down into the lobby of the building and fired several more shots at the 51-year-old mother of his girlfriend’s suspected lover, striking her in the hand, sources said.

The wounded woman, identified as Romano, was taken to St. John’s Hospital in stable condition.

Maine police officials are looking for Oceancrest Boulevard resident Aubrey Armstrong in connection with a drug murder in Augusta last November.

A Far Rockaway man has been identified by authorities in Maine as the fourth person involved with a drug-related killing of a man inside an Augusta apartment in November.

According to a published story in the Portland (Maine) Press Herald newspaper, Aubrey Armstrong, 26, of Far Rockaway, was indicted last month by the Kennebec County grand jury and police have been looking for him since then, according to a news release Tuesday from Steve McCausland, spokesman for the Department of Public Safety. Armstrong, who went by the street name “Butta,” was described as 5 feet, 8 inches tall and weighing 155 pounds.

Joseph Marceau, 31, was found dead inside an apartment at 75 Washington St. the night of Nov. 23 when police responded to a report of a disturbance there about 8 p.m.

Three other people were charged following the killing. Locals Zina Marie Fritze, 27 and Michael Sean McQuade, 45, pleaded not guilty in January. A day later, Fritze died after hanging herself in her jail cell at the Kennebec County jail. Damik Davis, 25, also from Rockaway, is also charged with murder.

Two months ago, the governor of Maine charged that the growth of Heroin use in the state was due to dealers coming in from New York City and specifically from Rockaway and other parts of Queens.

Armstrong likely fled back to Rockaway following Marceau’s killing, McCausland said Tuesday. Police have been working with the U.S. Marshal’s Service and New York law enforcement agencies to find him, and his last known address was 2312 Oceancrest Blvd in Far Rockaway.

“New York authorities have tried to retrace his steps, including searching that address, but we have no idea where he is,” McCausland said in an interview Tuesday. “It’s doubtful he’d return to Maine, but because we’ve been unable to locate him the decision was made to release his name.”

McCausland said authorities are not aware of any other contacts Armstrong would have in Maine.

Police asked that anyone with information on Armstrong’s whereabouts to call state police in Augusta at 207-624-7076 or a local law enforcement agency.

Maine Governor Paul LePage got into trouble for saying that black gang members from New York City were coming to his state, selling drugs and “impregnating white women.” He was right about the drug part because two Rockaway men were recently convicted of selling drugs and another of murder in a drug deal gone wrong.

Rockaway resident Anthony Pratt, Jr., flanked by his defense team, recently lost an appeal on a murder conviction and will spend the next few decades in a Maine prison.

Maine Governor Paul LePage got in trouble with the press and his more liberal colleagues last week for commenting about drug dealers flooding the state and impregnating “white girls,” which his critics said had “a racist tone.” He blamed the media for taking his words out of context.

“My brain was slower than my mouth,” LePage, a Republican, told reporters at the state house in Augusta. “The take-away is this: I don’t really care what the press thinks about me. But I want the drug dealers to know: I’m after them.”

In discussing the problem at a town hall meeting last week, LePage said: “These aren’t the people who take drugs. These are guys with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty – these types of guys. Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a young white girl before they leave, which is a really sad thing.”

Actually, there are many in Maine, particularly those in the law enforcement area, who believe that LePage has nothing to apologize for because he is right, and a number of former Rockaway gang-bangers have already been arrested and tried in large Maine cities – not for impregnating white Maine women, but for drugs and even murder.

According to the Portland (Maine) Press Herald in an edition published on April 26 of last year, drug traffickers have found Maine is fertile ground.

The reason is simple economics.

In business – legitimate or otherwise – the laws of supply and demand hold.

Drug gangs from large cities such as New York and Boston have found that their main product – cheap Heroin – is a big hit in Maine.

A massive drug sweep in January of 2014 that resulted in the arrest of two dozen people in the Lewiston area provided a glimpse of that phenomenon.

According to the paper, the investigation established, for the first time, a concrete link between Maine and the gang-controlled drug operations in the New York City borough of Queens.

At least two of the people arrested in January after a months-long investigation have direct ties to the powerful Crips street gang in Far Rockaway, what the paper calls “a rough neighborhood in Queens.”

In that case, Jamel Hamilton, who goes by the nickname “Murder,” has been charged with conspiracy to distribute heroin. Hamilton, who was identified by police as a gang leader, was arrested nine years ago in a similar drug sweep in a Far Rockaway public housing project.

Another man, Christian Dent, who was arrested in January in Maine, was part of the same previous drug sweep. He was identified as one of Hamilton’s top lieutenants.

Most heroin that ends up in the U.S. is produced in Mexico or Colombia, where opium is abundant and the supply is controlled by powerful cartels. The biggest of those cartels, the Sinaloa, supplies heroin directly to New York, which then distributes it to other areas.

Maine Drug Enforcement Agency Director Roy McKinney said Maine, along with other northern New England states, is being targeted by urban dealers for obvious reasons: A dealer can sell a gram of heroin in Maine for as much as three times what it would bring in New York.

“There was a time in Maine where you would see heroin smuggled in that was packaged for sale,” McKinney said. “That day is no longer. Now we see bulk heroin, and it’s being milled and packaged here. There’s simply more money to be made than in the saturated Greater New York market, and the dealers know that.”

McKinney said that last year, 17 percent of all drug traffickers his agents arrested were not Maine residents.

“It used to be that Maine dealers would leave the state to get their supply and bring it back,” he said. “Now, these larger (drug) organizations are coming here or having people come here.”

Another Rockaway drug dealer was arrested in 2012 for murder involved with a drug deal gone wrong.

Just last week, The Maine Supreme Judicial Court denied the appeal of convicted murderer Anthony Pratt Jr., who fatally shot a woman in the neck in Portland (Maine) and left her body in the back of her SUV in a motel parking lot.

Pratt, 22, who was a drug dealer in Rockaway before he moved north, said in his appeal that the judge in his 2014 trial should not have allowed jurors to listen to a recorded police interview in New York in which the lead detective investigating Margarita Fisenko Scott’s death repeatedly called Pratt a liar.

The panel of six justices ruled unanimously against Pratt’s appeal.

Pratt was convicted of shooting Scott, 29, on Nov. 11, 2012, in the living room of an apartment at 266 West Concord St., where he was living with a couple he knew, also from Rockaway. The Rockaway couple were not named in connection with the murder.

Police say Pratt killed Scott, cleaned up the blood and disposed of her body.